bookmonkey: Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg

Rating (out of five): ΔΔ

You know the phrase, “I couldn’t put the book down”? After reading Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors my reaction was the exact opposite. I couldn’t put the book up. Leslie Feinberg is a hero for many people, including myself. Feinberg’s personal gender story, Stone Butch Blues, is a story I can relate to in many ways. After reading Stone Butch Blues and having heard Leslie Feinberg speak at the Translating Identities Conference in 2005 I was sure that Transgender Warriors would be a good read. That was not the case, however.

Transgender Warriors aims to be a history of people who do not conform to traditional gender roles. Instead the book ends up being an outlet for the socialist ideas Feinberg adheres to. Often Feinberg veers off-topic, making comments such as, “McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts were in full frenzy…,” writes about factory strikes and denounces capitalism. This review is not saying there is anything particularly wrong with socialism. It is simply that if one wants to read a book about socialism they can go read What Is the Real Marxist Tradition? or The Communist Manifesto. If you’re looking to read about the history of gender nonconformity Transgender Warriors is not the book for you.

Feinberg goes into detail at times about persons who transcend gender roles and characteristics, which is fine. But in addition, Feinberg goes too far by calling various people in different cultures transgender. This may not make sense at first but keep reading. The term “transgender” originates from Latin and English. The word “gender” in Latin means 'kind', 'type', or 'sort'. Feinberg comes off as being yet another colonizer within the book when Feinberg takes apart important spiritual symbols for Native Americans and places the Western label of transgender, first made popular in the 1970’s, onto those Native American customs. It is offensive and potentially degrading. Feinberg’s book is disempowering rather than empowering in that sense.

This book is one example of many that indicates there is a big problem with the word “transgender,” which is that the term “transgender” is too broad. Merriam-Webster’s definition of transgender is, “Having personal characteristics (as transsexuality or transvestism) that transcend traditional gender boundaries and corresponding sexual norms.” It is too broad for several reasons, one being that traditional gender boundaries vary from culture to culture. In one country, for instance Scotland, it may be acceptable for a male to wear a skirt and in another country the action is reviled. Does it make the male in Scotland transgender to wear a skirt? In addition, traditional gender boundaries may change within a culture. Women playing an active role in the U.S. military used to be a rarity. There are women throughout U.S. history who disguised themselves as male in order to be in the military. Would we call these women transgender? Would we call female soldiers of modern age transgender? Where do we draw the line?

In many instances Feinberg claims that persons from various cultures are transgender. Unless someone has a medical diagnosis (and sometimes not even) since when is it okay for someone to label someone else transgender? For instance, Feinberg claims that the infamous Amazon warriors were transgender. This was because, as Feinberg writes, “To the Greeks, these Amazons were masculine women who bore themselves like men.” This is the biggest failing in the book. It is ludicrous to say that individuals are transgender because their gender expression is different than modern-day societal expectations. Many people would take offense to being labeled transgender by another person on the basis that they do things that aren’t considered traditional activities for their assigned gender. Imagine calling a woman transgender for being athletic or being good at mathematics, or calling a male transgender for cooking or cleaning.

Certainly, the Amazons cut off one of their breasts because one of their primary weapons was the bow and arrow. Feinberg, however, tries to indicate that this is further evidence of the Amazons being transgender. Maybe some of them got breast cancer in one breast. Who knows? The point is that it is impossible to look back at other cultures of which there is not much knowledge and try to fit those culture’s customs into a convenient box to prove something. Feinberg assuredly had the best of intentions, but it ends up being a discredit to Transgender Warriors.

I cannot completely knock the book. The pictures included throughout the book were very beautiful and meaningful. It seems though there are too many images and not enough content. Transgender Warriors is enlightening in the sense that it does describe aspects of history in a different way and opens the readers’ mind to new concepts and events throughout time. This goal could have been fulfilled in a very different way.

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social control and the social good

Did you know that I am generally unprepared to write about politics? I studied many things in college, but I am no political scientist. My thinking also tends toward the radical and revolutionary, which makes finding a party to support (in the USA) excruciatingly difficult on both idealistic and pragmatic levels. My tentative and uneducated assertion has long been as follows: if you could somehow combine the best of socialism and libertarianism, I’d be all for it. In all likelihood, this is an ignorant and unsustainable position (obvious conflict aside), but I have yet to spend sufficient time immersed in the economic and political theory needed to advance my understanding. At heart, I’m just someone who cares about society and realizes that politics shape even the most intimate personal experiences.

We pomos are an interesting lot, suggesting that people are fettered by social construction, yet many of us believing (hoping) there must be ways to "liberate" ourselves from one set of constructions in favor of a new construction that will somehow be more empowering. The goal of unabashed individual expression undeniably requires constructing others ourselves to tolerate, accept and even embrace what to them us is distasteful. We seem easily to do this with things like food preference, so people argue that we could and should feel similarly about nearly all difference, including sexual interests. It will take social construction to extend that thinking (just as our attitude toward food is itself socially constructed), though—and this policy of embracing and encouraging difference may well make society harder to operate smoothly.

As an ex of mine always said, "We have heuristics for a reason. If we had to constantly evaluate people as they wanted to identify—without drawing on stereotypes to process the person’s skin, dress, body type, accent, and so on—we’d be spending so much time just on figuring out how to relate to individuals that we’d be in overload, and we couldn’t get to the point of our would-be conversations, the actual relating." Maybe this is true. It’s hard to say, because none of us grew up in this purely theoretical, fluid-identity society.

And maybe this observation by my ex is also telling us something about the society in which most of us did grow up: everything is pointed. I converse with you to get something out of it. The conversation itself, the process of meeting new people and learning new things and figuring out how to relate, is secondary and sometimes even inconvenient. I don’t mean to be simplistic or glib, but we do often seem to care more about efficiency and utility than about the nature and quality of our lives. People often contrast "Western" and "Eastern" thought at moments like this: the individualistic versus the communal, the plot-driven story versus the exploratory tale. I don’t think that’s really fair or thorough, though, not to mention that it poses a contrast between two (flattened) concepts as if one must have all the right answers. (And again, it’s about solutions. Where’s the process?)

I do want to know whether/how we can acknowledge and openly use social construction—as we are silently participating in unnamed constructions regardless—without becoming just as uncompromising and rigid as the current rules suggest. This is where my previous idea of utopia comes into play, and I think we need to focus on self-reflection and the process of monitoring social construction, rather than reaching a static ending point where the construction is considered forever perfect and complete. Much as I’d love to rely on increasing transparency and setting up a process for change, however, part of me wonders what powers will be rendered invisible in this new world order, and whether they’ll be even harder to unveil given the illusion that all is already revealed.

This post was originally going to be about the latest controversial article on Michael Bailey and his questionable scientific methods. Coincidentally, I’m 85% certain that a fellow Equality Rider worked in his laboratory at Northwestern, or at least in the same department. But anyway, as you can all see, I distracted myself with broader thinking about social control. The NY Times article mentions criticism of unpopular research versus criticism of unscientific research; perhaps in another post I’ll explore our privileging of "the scientific" as unconstructed fact and how we are constantly policing that boundary as well.

But for now, I bid you "Happy Tuesday!" (And, if you like, happy feast day for St. Augustine of Hippo, who embroiled us all in sin.)

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bookmonkey: The Whipping Girl, by Julia Serano

Rating (out of five): ΔΔΔΔΔ

A rare event has occurred in the area of gender studies, and that event is the publication of The Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman On Sexism and The Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano. Not often do readers have the luxury of reading a thorough, fairly objective yet personal appraisal of misogyny from a transsexual woman. In this segment I simultaneously present a review of The Whipping Girl while tying what Serano writes into some of my personal experiences with gender.

Julia Serano’s book courageously presents situations in which femininity is treated with sincere disdain. The Whipping Girl’s main focus is to show how transgender phobia is not based on dislike of persons who are transgender solely for those persons being transgender. Rather, transphobia is described as being based on the hatred of femininity. What is most striking in the book is how Serrano sheds light the ways in which femininity, in particular, is frowned upon within the queer community and explores how masculinity is often most applauded. When femininity is accepted in the queer community it is within the drag show setting where femininity becomes a show, an act to please an audience. Serrano repeatedly illustrates how society as a whole carries the perception that femininity is a farce created to please those who witness it.

To make this a little more personal, in my late teens I transitioned from female-to-male (FTM), and I identified somewhere between being a gay and bisexual male. To fully embody living as a male I underwent a series of physical alterations such as two years of testosterone hormone therapy and several surgeries that ultimately gave me a masculine appearance. But after two years of transition I began to have an experience similar to what Serrano herself describes in her book as going through. That experience being that my subconscious sex was misaligned with my physical body. In my early 20s, I decided to de-transition and live as a woman again because I came to realization that my subconscious sex is female, much like Serano.

Serrano’s explanation of the concept of “subconscious sex” is an eloquent description of what many transgender people experience. Subconscious sex as described in Whipping Girl is the mental understanding of what one’s sex is regardless of what sex the physical body is. Many people are born with their physical sex and subconscious sex aligned but transgender people often times have subconscious and physical sexes at odds with each other.

The concept of “subconscious sex” that Serano touches on not only correlates with a lot of transgender people but also with non-transgender people, or cissexual people, as Serano states. For instance, one can examine cases where non-trans women who have had masectomies feel the strong desire to have breast implants because they feel incomplete without breasts. The concept of subconscious sex could be part of an explanation for that desire. Serano also discusses the effect large amounts of testosterone has on someone whose subconscious sex is female and goes as far as using the term “testosterone poisoning”. Cissexual women also experience similar effects when misusing androgens to develop muscle mass.

While there is minimal mention of the problematic fetishization of masculinity and dislike of femininity in the queer community there has been little to no recognition of this phenomenon in the realm of gender studies. The Whipping Girl dissects the sexualizing of female-to-male transsexuals within the lesbian community and briefly discusses the misogyny within the gay male community as well. When I was transitioning from female-to-male, many people in the queer community not only treated me with more respect (I felt empowered) but I was also pursued sexually and in some ways treated like some kind of sexual force. This was vastly different from when I was a female lesbian in the queer community; while I was well-liked, I was rarely sexually pursued and not given nearly as much authority or respect as when I transitioned to male. And now that I am living as a woman again I experience the same shift of treatment where I feel less valued, less powerful, less attractive.

And, of course, the funniest part of this situation is that within the straight world that I now technically identify with… I am told I am too masculine. Serano writes in great detail on heterosexual attitudes about gender and how women are expected to be feminine and men masculine. From reading her book it is clear that there is still much misogyny in heterosexual society, even with feminist movements. Serano talks about how feminist gender deconstructionist theory considers femininity to be a social construct and how transsexual womens’ experiences contradict gender deconstruction theory. She berates those gender theorists who take transgendered experiences and maim those experiences to prove the theory du jour.

To sum this all up, The Whipping Girl is a meaningful read. Do I recommend it? Without a doubt. This book is an unsinkable ship in the turbulent sea of gender theories.

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